Linking "off site" was an early feature of blogs that commercial newspapers' sites were slow to adopt, for fear of letting the reader escape to the other distractions of the Web.

We've come a long way... Now The New York Times "Extra" button on its home page gives you an expanded page view with extra links beneath the story summaries -- links to external content, such as Jim Romenesko's Media News blog, or related stories by other newspapers. (See the Washington Times and L.A. Times in the example at the left.)

I can't believe it's been almost three years since I wrote this about news rivers... Unfortunately the first part of my 2006 post refers to a site that no longer exists, but this part is still relevant:

News Nerd Nostalgia: Ah, ATEX.
Back when Jimmy Carter was president, anyone with a big computer
downstairs and tens of thousands of dollars in wire service
subscriptions could read a daily "river of news" on our computer
screens. (The people I'm talking about were editors at daily
newspapers. I was compiling a daily page two "People" column using wire
news, so I got one of the first wave of terminals at The Hartford Courant.)

We
could scroll down through all the days stories in reverse-chronological
order, even split the screen to compare the AP and UPI wire stories
about the same event, then move paragraphs back and forth to create a
"combined wires" story. You could choose whether to just browse the
headlines, or expand them all to whatever number of lines of the story
would give you enough information. It still felt very "Buck Rogers" as
late as 1979! When I went back to grad school that year, I was
disappointed to find that the university's computer terminals couldn't
do anything like ATEX. Most of them didn't even do upper-and-lower-case
letters. Times & technology do change.